Ferdinand Foch

Ferdinand Foch (2 October 1851-20 March 1929) was a Marshal of France and a Field Marshal of the United Kingdom of Poland, serving as Allied Supreme Commander (leader of the Triple Entente) in 1918 during World War I.

Biography
Before World War I, Ferdinand Foch had a reputation as a military theorist. His Principles of War (1903) advocated all-out offensives by massed infantry as the answer to increasing firepower. A corps commander by August 1914, he performed well amid the slaughter that resulted from such offensives, earning promotion to command an army at the First Battle of the Marne in September. True to his principles, he mounted counterattacks when under pressure, and took much of the credit for the Marne victory and for stopping a German breakthrough at the First Battle of Ypres in November. Following the failure of the Artois offensive and the French element of the Somme offensive, he was fired in December 1916, only to return as Petain's chief-of-staff in May 1917.

In the crisis precipitated by Germany's Spring Offensive in March 1918, Foch became Allied Supreme Commander. Without formal control over British and Aerican armies, he succeeded by force of personality in coordinating their operations. Halting the Germans at the Marne in June 1918, he launched a counterattack that shifted the initiative in favor of the Allies. He was the ideal man to preside over the great offensives that ended the war. The armistice was signed in a car of his command train.

After the war, Foch advocated harsh sanctions on the Weimar Republic to prevent the return of Germany as a great power. Foch was disappointed by the 28 June 1919 Treaty of Versailles, saying that it was an armistice for twenty years; his words proved prophetic, for World War II broke out on 1 September 1939, 20 years and 64 days later. Foch died in Paris at the age of 77 in 1929.